


Lost My Direction (I Caught the Infection)

by quicklittlebasterd



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Military, F/F, F/M, Mild Blood, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29300244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicklittlebasterd/pseuds/quicklittlebasterd
Summary: It ends the way it all began: with Sara Lance getting arrested.orThe Army taught Sara Lance a lot, everything else she learned while she was MIA.
Relationships: Laurel Lance & Oliver Queen, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Nyssa al Ghul/Sara Lance
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	Lost My Direction (I Caught the Infection)

**Author's Note:**

> Experimenting with a new style. Please forgive any inaccuracies, I did not serve in the military and google can only tell me so much. I played with the timeline a little too. My SO helped, so I guess all the mistakes are hers?  
> Please let me know what you think.. Standard disclaimer..

It ends the way it all began: with Sara Lance getting arrested. It’s so beautifully full circle that if she weren’t so utterly emotionally and physically exhausted she would compose sonnets about the symmetry, use epic poetry to describe the balance. It’s poetic justice. It’s pure irony. She thinks. Laurel would probably know. Her mother  _ definitely _ would. Her dad (who’s opinion on the epitome of poetry is 80s hair metal) most likely would not. But he’d agree with whoever shouted the loudest in order to keep the peace. 

Fuck. She really missed her family.

“Corporal Lance.”

Sara startles, having lost her train of thought. The metal chair on the other side of the table makes a horrible screeching sound as it is moved around so that a woman in dark gray fatigues can take a seat opposite her. She spreads official looking manilla folders across the tabletop.

“Corporal Lance, I am-”

“-Sergeant Lyla Michaels or- uh,” she stutters to a stop, taking in the A.R.G.U.S stitch work on the front of her uniform top, “Agent Michaels, now, I guess?”

Her eyebrows rise just the slightest bit in surprise but her face remains otherwise impassive. Sara realizes that the face of a high ranking official in a paramilitary is probably not widely known and she shakes her head, “I served under Sergeant Diggle in Afghanistan.”

“I remember. He spoke very highly of you,” she nods, but does not smile. “Corporal Lance, do you know where you are?”

Sara looks around the nondescript room: concrete walls and floors, metal table and chairs, a single light hanging from the ceiling. She had a more comfortable room in the village at the base of the mountain. 

“Honestly, no.”

“Do you know how you got here?”

She spreads her hands as far as they’ll go while wearing handcuffs and shrugs, “I remember a truck and a helicopter.”

“And do you remember anything about where you were before that?” They were alone in the room, but Sara remembers the sight of armed guards just outside the now closed door. And the ones in the hall. And the ones outside the spartan room she had been sleeping in the last few nights.

She presses her lips into a frown and looks the other woman in the eyes. “What do you want from me Agent Michaels?”

“Corporal Lance,” the Agent’s tone becomes noticeably softer, “seven months ago your unit was attacked outside of Kandahar. A week ago you were found in a tiny village at the base of the Hindu Kush almost a thousand kilometers away. Can you tell me how that happened?”

Sara drops her hands to the table top and rolls her shoulders to work out a knot that was beginning to form at the top of her back. 

It started a lot like this, she thinks, with getting arrested. 

-

She’s sixteen and already more than either of her parents know how to handle. She’s whip smart but none of her teachers can get her to pay attention in class, if she even bothers to show up. She’s outgoing and gregarious and has never met a stranger a day in her life. She’s sweet as sin and twice as wild and knows exactly how to press her lips and bat her eyelashes to get anything and everything she wants. Except she’s sixteen and hasn’t quite figured out how to trace all the lines of consequences to all her actions yet. 

So she’s sitting in a holding cell in a sheriff department some miles out of Starling City because she’d out drank a boy four years her senior at a frat party. Because said frat boy doesn’t understand that creeping a hand up her thigh while she’s driving his ridiculously sensitive sports car 20 miles an hour over the speed limit is a terrible idea. Because deputy Leah Callahan is apparently immune to Sara’s lowered gaze and bow lips.

(She doesn’t know yet why that upsets her so, but it  _ really _ does.)

It’s three in the morning and her father only manages to spare her a dark look as he passes by on his way to the back office. He’s still in his uniform, his shift ending not long before, and he looks ragged and upset and lost. Guilt and shame settle in her belly and with the adrenaline all worn off she has to fight the urge to cry.

She catches part of their conversation, the two deep males voices an easy cadence in the still of the night, “-not going to press charges-” 

“-don’t know what to do, Jimmy-” her father’s tenor drifts through the air.

There’s more rumbles, the squeaking of chairs and the whirl of a coffee machine. And then…

“There’s always military school.”

-

Her parents fight about it. Her mom can’t stand the thought of sending her away. Dinah Lance sees too much of herself in their youngest to imagine that it could do anything but stifle everything beautiful in her. Her dad is cracked but resolute, he knows the path she’s on and knows that while there are many ways it could end, more than half of them aren’t good. Their voices carry through their closed bedroom door, loud and angry.

Sara is sitting on the living room floor while Laurel sits on the couch behind her, knees bracing her shoulders as she runs her fingers through Sara’s long blonde locks, twisting it into braids before pulling them apart. 

“I think I really fucked up, Laul.” 

Her sister hums in probable agreement and scratches at the base of her skull, “What are you gonna do, Little Lance?”

She drops head back and looks up at her sister, “What can I do?”

Laurel taps her nose lightly and tries to ease the frown lines from between Sara’s bright blue eyes, “You can make the best of it.”

-

Sara wants to hate it. It’s a fucking cliche that the wildchild just needs structure and disipline to thrive. She wants to rant and rave and do whatever it takes to make her displeasure known. Except she’s too exhausted at the end of the day to do much more than kick off her boots and shower. She loves combat training, loves the strategy and classwork. Loves the comradery of her unit. She loves everything about it.

Sara is given structure and discipline and strength and direction and she fucking thrives.

-

She graduates at the top of her class with commendations and her dad cries because he’s so proud. Laurel is wrapped around her, beaming and so gloriously happy while her boyfriend Oliver Queen stands several feet away looking completely out of his depth. Her mom immediately starts talking about colleges and the future and putting all this military mess behind them. 

Sara doesn’t know how to tell her that she’s already enlisted. That she’d scored damn near perfect on the ASVAB and talked to the recruiter and they’d mapped out all the steps she needs to become a combat medic and serve overseas. 

-

She’s half way through her first contract and not even old enough to walk into a bar and order a drink by the time she’s finished her first tour of duty. She stays with Laurel during her leave. Her sister is living with Oliver (who is never home) and applying to law schools, but she buries the stress as best as she can. Their parents are going through a semi-amicable divorce, Quinten has made detective and has a harder time leaving the work at the office and Dinah has already accepted a position at Central City University.

Sara has been in active combat. The platoon she served with has some of the best men and women she’s ever met (and a few of the worst), she’s been on the front line and pulled bloodied and battered soldiers from wreckage and patched them up to the best of her ability. She’s lost soldiers, felt their blood pump hot beneath her hands until it stopped pumping all together. She’s felt her soul break into a million pieces and she put it back together because there were near fifty other soldiers who counted on her to keep her shit together under pressure. She can and she does.

But she lets Laurel talk about finals and deadlines and whether or not Oliver might propose because even though Sara doesn’t get it she knows it’s important to Laurel. She loves her sister and her dad and her mom and the Starling Rockets, but it isn’t until she’s back in fatigues and packing for her second tour that she feels at home. 

(She’s been back on base for months when she gets the call from her father that Oliver Queen is missing at sea, presumed dead. Laurel is understandably distraught and Quentin somehow manages to sound both upset and not as he delivers the news. That Sara understands. She wonders if she’d be more upset as well if she had never joined the Army, wonders if she would be closer to Oliver, wonders exactly  _ how _ much closer if her embarrassing crush on him in high school was any sort of indicator. But she dismisses the thought and decides she’ll just call her sister back at her next break.)

-

During her second tour she meets Master Sergeant John Diggle, who is serving his third, and he is possibly the most honorable man she’d ever met aside from her father. He is kind and funny, strong and solid, and oh so heartbroken. He helps her with her Arabic, gently correcting her horrid pronunciation until it at least resembles the flowing language. He teaches her to use escrima sticks and they spar in the unit’s downtime (of which there is much). They talk about the Starling Rockets’ lineup and chances at a championship down the line and make plans to go to a game together when and if they ever end up stateside at the same time during the season.

Their convoy gets hit in the Paktika Province, an IED nearly taking his legs out from under him, but he cracks jokes about his tiny blonde (emasculating) crutch and grits his teeth and smiles at her later while she’s picking enough shrapnel from his calf so she can clean and wrap it well enough to get him somewhere with a surgical tent. She loses two soldiers that day, but had her hands on a dozen more so she tries to find the balance somewhere in there. 

-

Her third tour comes with her second contract (the one her mother is utterly convinced her daughter would not sign), although this one is only for two years, and with it comes Kandahar and another ambushed convoy. This one is more direct, more deadly and there is rapid gunfire all around her and no chance for her to get to anyone under the constant hail of bullets. In all the noise she entirely misses the lobed grenade as it thumps in the sand on the other side of the wrecked Humvee. It does not entirely miss her.

When she wakes up an indeterminate amount of time later, she can’t hear anything except a high pitched ringing in her ears. She is laying down in the back of a moving vehicle, her mouth is dry and her eyes feel sticky and full of sand. Her head is propped up against her field kit and there is a man dressed in a black jacket with steel studs sitting opposite her. His head and face are covered and there is a long curved sword laying across his lap. He does not look like the men who attack her unit but the world tilts heavily to one side and she loses consciousness again before she can worry about what that might mean.

The next time she awakens, she is sitting upright and there is a hand roughly jostling her shoulder. Her hands are bound in front of her, wrists raw from the rough rope, and there is a woman placing a bottle of water to her lips. Sara sips at it despite her overwhelming thirst, and eyes the woman. She is dressed similarly to the man from before, except her black jacket isn’t studded, but the hood and veil are settled bulkily around her neck so Sara can see her smooth, dark features and long braided hair. More a girl than woman, but Sara wouldn’t do her or her wicked looking sword the disservice of doing anything more than thinking it once. 

“ _ Drink, _ ” she tells her in soft spoken Arabic and Sara thanks every deity she’s ever heard of for John Diggle and his lessons, “ _ We will arrive soon.” _

Sara does not wish to startle her into action so with deliberate movements she takes the water and finishes it slowly. 

They do arrive soon, no more than an hour later, and Sara is dragged from the bed of the truck by her bound wrists and the woman grabs her field kit and follows them. She is given no chance to stretch her legs or work out the cramps from being prone for so long after unconsciousness so she stumbles and trips as she is hurried through a small village, passing curious looking women and children and men who sneer at her bloody desert fatigues. 

They approach a house, more hut than anything, at what must be the center of the village and she is shoved through a hastily opened door, barely managing to stay on her feet. The windows have been covered so the only light was from dozens of flickering candles and the air was absolutely stifling. There was hardly any furniture, a small table with two chairs, a cupboard and a narrow bed that was barely off the floor. 

“ _ You,”  _ the man pulled hard on her bindings and dragged her towards the bed, which Sara was surprised to find occupied by what appeared to be a violently shivering woman, “ _ Fix.” _

Sara blinked back at him. “ _ Fix? _ ” she croaked back, throat still painfully dry and head swimming. 

He drew a knife from his belt and jerked her hands forward, skillfully severing the rope. The woman approached more slowly, holding out Sara’s field kit in one steady hand. 

“ _ Save her.” _

Sara isn’t stupid. She may not know a lot about what is currently going on around her or who any of these people are, but she knows they are probably not allied to the US Army. They don’t talk like the insurgents she’s been dealing with for five years and she’s never met a mercenary who carried a sword instead of a firearm, but friendlies don’t tie you up or hold you at knife point. 

She isn’t a doctor. She’s never taken the Hippocratic Oath. She has no moral obligation to help anyone in this room or village. 

And yet…

Well, no one had ever accused Sara Lance of having idle hands. 

She takes the kit and ignores the blades that flashed her way with a roll of her eyes. She approachs the patient and draws back the sheet, clinically taking in the pallor of the woman’s tanned skin and the way she shivers even violently despite the sweat that beads along all of her exposed skin. 

She was clutching weakly at her side so that’s where Sara starts, peeling back her hands and the black material of her singlet to reveal a mangled attempt at a bullet removal three days past infection. 

“Do you have any medical supplies?” she turns to ask her audience, “Anything I can use?”

The man kicks her own bag that sits next to where she currently kneeling and Sara wants to kick him back. 

“Fine. I’ll need water, boiled and cooled as much as possible. And clean rags.”

Sara starts pulling equipment from her bag: forceps, gauze, alcohol pads, sutures and everything else she could think of she piles neatly on top of her bag. She’s snapping her gloves into place when she glances back and sees that neither of them had moved. 

“Now!” she barks and the man makes a move as if to lunge at her but the woman holds him back and jerks her chin towards the door. They glare at one another, silently arguing but about what Sara couldn’t care less. 

She tears open alcohol pads and tries her best to clean the area, probing and assessing the abscess that had formed under the hastily pulled stitches. Sara knows what to do, now she just has to get from point A to point B.

The woman kneels gently next to her and smooths her hands across the collarbone of the semi-conscious woman in the bed as if to offer comfort or hold her down. “What can I do?” she asks, her voice is soft but strained, distressed, and her English was accented but near perfect. The woman in the bed clearly means a lot to her. Hopefully she means enough for her to trust Sara.

“Well, first of all, I’m going to need your knife.”

-

Hours later (and days and weeks and months and years after that) when Sara thinks back to that moment, she realizes that she’d had two fingers in the woman’s abdomen feeling for a stubborn fragment of a bullet and a slow blood leak but could not remember what she looked like.


End file.
